A Mother's Love
by Ayaren
Summary: Irina reflects. She found the prospect of betraying him harder than she ever imagined.


Disclaimer: Alias is not mine.

Title: A Mother's Love

Author: Ayaren (aka Abyssinian)

Rating: PG

Timeline: Season Two, 'The Telling'.

Summary: She found the prospect of betraying him harder than she ever imagined.

A/N: okay, I'm not sure if this fic makes sense, but I'm posting it anyway.

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Somewhere God was laughing at Irina Derevko with an 'I told you so' hovering on His lips. Somewhere the Fates were cackling madly with glee. Somewhere someone had just taken credit for the coup of the century.

Because even as she knew handing Sark over to the CIA was her only option —at least the only one Sydney would believe in time to save Jack's life— Irina found the prospect of betraying him harder than she ever imagined it would be. She had known this day would come, and for that reason she had cautioned herself not to become attached to him.

Somehow she had failed. She never meant to love him. Protect and train him, yes. Demand his loyalty and obedience, yes. Love him, no. From the very beginning she had tried to distance herself from him. Raise him and shape him to her desired image but never mother him, never give him cause to expect anything from her.

So where had she gone wrong?

She first began watching him when he was still a boy. He had been tested under the KGB's version of Project Christmas and found to possess a sharp mind and keen sense of observation, well suited to the kind of work she did. His ambition, even at the age of nine, impressed her. Alone and unable to fully trust those around him he possessed a knack for survival that she had never had at the same age. He knew what it was to suffer, and instead of letting it weaken him he measured himself by it, forced himself to grow stronger to spite those who had caused him pain.

In a sense he was a typical textbook case. His mother was gone and his father, after having beaten and ignored him, abandoned the five year old without caring whether the boy lived or died thousands of miles from home in his English boarding school by the lake.

It was a beautiful place, that school. However, beneath that shell ran a poison few survived unscathed. He survived, she had made sure of that, but he had been irreparably damaged and that made him perfect for her.

She met him face to face when he was thirteen years old. His blonde curls and Slavic cheekbones gave him a faintly angelic look, but the glitter, the hardness in his blue eyes betrayed him. This was no messenger of God. She was not surprised that he had already learned how to hate, even before he learned to love. He scorned the Russian accent of his father and used that of his mother's Ireland instead, though this was so entwined with nearly a decade of British that the distinctive lilt was absent.

That was what characterised him. He belonged everywhere and at the same time, nowhere.

Masquerading as a teacher she constructed a tenuous bond with him. Patiently waiting for him to trust her as she gently steered him in the direction she wanted. She never pushed him because she knew he would only push back, and she would lose him. In time he proved an avid pupil, devouring the knowledge she gave him and always asking for more with an eagerness she recognised from her own days as a student of the KGB.

In the deep hours of the night she taught him what she knew, forced him to recall his Project Christmas training and put it to practise. In the holidays she took him to Spain, to a villa she had purchased just for him. Khasinau joined them there, taking the young Lazarey under his wing and continuing his instruction when she was required elsewhere.

His father knew nothing, only that his son was out of the way and he was free to pursue his own affairs.

Her protégé made his first kill at fifteen. It was a routine assassination and she trusted his abilities enough to dispense with the second asset she usually employed for first-timers. She was impressed watching the security footage as he slipped into the female target's office and slit her throat.

His hand was steady that day and his face held a satisfied smirk as blood spilled onto the expensive navy carpet. She knew then that he would be an asset to her empire. He could be one of her most dangerous weapons when she chose to unleash him. In finishing the damage that Andrian Lazaray and that school had started with him she had created a man who was essentially amoral, a man who killed without remorse and whose actions would not have the weight of guilt to hold them down.

He was a deranged angel, and he was her greatest accomplishment. All she had to do was control him.

When he was eighteen she took him away from the school, arranging for him to disappear without trace. She took him to their Spanish villa and told him that Julian Lazarey no longer existed. He needed to choose a new name, a name that would become synonymous with the fear he would one day evoke.

Sark, he decided in that devilish tone of his. Mister Sark, he tested it out with a rare grin and then explained that first names were unnecessary. She understood, she was the 'Man', an even more obscure title. She smiled back, telling him Julian would be a secret between only them and Khasinau, and impulsively embraced him, startling them both.

And Mr Sark was born.

She never meant to love him, and it was years before she realised she did. Seeing him in the flesh again after the months of her incarceration she felt a rush of relief. He was safe, and he was still loyal to her. She had gambled everything on that loyalty, that he would go to Sloane and not abandon her. Seated on the plane, watching him through half-closed eyes as he crouched over his laptop she made the connection. She felt the same thing for him as she felt for Sydney. That feeling of relief, concern and guilt. Relief that he was with her again, concern that he might not trust her anymore and guilt over the things they had both been forced to do while parted.

He felt her watching him, he always knew when her eyes were on him, and looked up. His face gave almost nothing away. If she had not known him so well she would not have seen it, the faint glimmer of relief in his eyes as the corners of his mouth turned up in a brief smile.

She smiled back and gestured for him to come to her. He did so, putting the laptop aside as he slid gracefully into the seat next to her. Before she realised what she was doing her hand reached up and touched his cheek gently and then his hair.

He closed his eyes and leaned into her hand, the tension draining from him as she stroked his blonde curls like a cat. He asked her if she knew what Sloane had made him do. Instantly her mind recalled Sydney's report from the church in Mexico City. The blackened skeletons littering the ground, unable to escape a fire they could not see. Sydney had barely escaped in time, and a miscalculation on the part of Sloane's scientists could have killed Sark too.

She told him she was sorry, that such things were necessary in their line of work. He shifted impatiently, having listened to the same lecture when he was still a boy. He saw through her words of comfort; saw that she was merely saying what she thought he should hear.

He retreated then, pulling away from her and going back to his computer, leaving her to her thoughts as he withdrew into his own. For years she had told herself she was fond of him, no more. That he was her clever young protégé, her favoured lieutenant and she owed him no more than a passing care.

She never took his presence for granted, always knew that although he professed his loyalty to her he would always do whatever he had to in order to survive, and if that meant giving her up he probably would. Though she hoped —dangerous she knew— that he would protect her as she had protected him.

But after seeing Sydney again she could no longer deny that she loved him. Yet she would admit it only in the silence of her own mind. And she knew with dead certainty that when she betrayed him she would lose what tenuous control over him that remained hers.

He did not love her. She was his employer, the woman who had taken everything away from him and given back more than he could ever dream of. She had made Julian Lazarey into Mr Sark, had taught him how to survive in their world. But she had kept nothing of him for herself. She had his loyalty, such as it was, but his love?

She deserved no such thing from him, no matter how her own heart yearned for it. He was the son she never had. But she was not his mother and he would never see her as one.

It was that knowledge, and only that, which gave her the strength to contact Sydney and hand him over to the CIA. If he was in her place he would have done the same, and without the brief scattering of tears she wept when the line went dead.

He would not cry, because that was the way she had made him.

END

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A/N2: I took the liberty of making Sark's mother Irish, to explain Marshall's assessment in I think it was season one that he was probably born in Galway, Ireland.

Okay people, be honest, it really doesn't make sense does it? And I think my Irina was a bit out of character, I dunno. And the ending seems a bit rushed. Writing stuff other than sarkney is harder than I thought.

Thank you to all my lovely reviewers for your feedback on my previous fics, you guys are the greatest.


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